Spanners in the Post.

The modern world is not rubbish. You can come home from work and find a spanner has been delivered to your doorstep. That wouldn't happen in the 80's.

Tomato for scale. It's a quite large cherry tomato.

The reason I need this spanner is despite earlier optimism, the "Check Engine" light on my R170 Mercedes SLK keeps coming on, showing error P0410 on the scanner. And none of my existing spanners will do. And who doesn't like more spanners?

Stop Doing that.

After extensive research (i.e. Google) it would appear I need one of these:

Part Number A0021406860. Or £50 as it is more commonly known.

The generic description of the P0410 error is something like "Air pump or associated wiring failed". It's to do with the part of the emissions system which pumps air into the exhaust for some reason. Only my car doesn't have an electric air pump - instead it uses the supercharger and a series of valves of which this is just one. 


So all I need to do is unbolt the old one and and bolt this one in.

Yes, that's how it works.

Regrettably. the old one is here:

Yes that's right - you can barely see it. It's between the back of the engine and the bulkhead nestling in a bundle of tubes and wires. Follow the rubber hose up from the bottom left. The other side of it is threaded into a metal pipe.

I've taken off all the fancy engine covers to reveal it - they are removed by the "pulling very hard" method.


So:

1. You can't actually get a spanner on it because the bolt hex part is too thin for a normal spanner.
2. If you could get a spanner on it, you can't turn it because there is no clearance
3. It's ultimately attached to the exhaust so it's virtually welded on with grot and heat.

Splendid.

First attempt I tried making tools out of bits of scrap metal:

I am skilled toolmaker

These variously bent, twisted off and ruined my knuckles.

Next I decided to remove the long pipe the valve is screwed into which snakes around the engine and opens into the exhaust manifold, then I could get it onto the bench. In my previous attempts with the home-made tools this was flexing alarmingly and I don't even want to know how much a new one costs.

I am replacing part 250.

The pipe (200) attaches to the manifold with this funky bolt (230) that you can't even seen - I needed my new 27mm spanner and sixth sense to get it off.

Removed (and replaced) using ESP. Don't loose the two malleable washers.

Annoyingly, once I removed that and the additional two bolts (210, 220) that hold the pipe in place, it was still jammed in. I managed to rotate it enough I could get at it though:

Yes, so very much more accessible.

The dirty great pipe spanner was used to hold the pipe (oddly enough - I do like to use the right tool for the job) in an effort to stop twisting the fitting off the end and also to help stop bending it; a serious amount of force was required to get the valve off. That was partially successful in that it only bent a bit making it just a slight mare to get back into place.

The hose clamp (270) isn't re-usable so was cut off and my Mercedes now sports a beautifully made clamp rescued from a 1970s Alfa Romeo. I think the clamp is the only bit of that car that didn't turn to dust.

The valve itself is a one-way valve - I could easily blow through the new one in one direction but the old one was blocked both ways - definitely broke and most likely the problem. When I went into the immaculately presented parts desk at the Mercedes dealer the lady there didn't even need to go look for it - she had a box full of them under the counter. Not an uncommon problem, perhaps. The fault has been reset again so hopefully that will be the end of it. 

That's a good 3 hour job by the time you are finished messing about. My hands may take longer to mend.

Life is much improved

Using only:

• Two barrel tabs from ebay
• A parts organiser box from a budget outlet
• A hole saw, a soldering iron and a glue gun

I made this:

Yes, I know, it is awesome.

Question:  what the hell is that?

Answer: You fill half of it with washing liquid and the other half with conditioner and you put it here:

I have no idea where the knob is.

You can save literally seconds of your life every time you put a wash on!

Lacking Adhesive Qualities..

This best of breed item is one of a set of cable clips I bought from Poundland (yes, for a pound) less than a year ago.

At least it didn't snap.

It's attached to whatever by one of those tenacious foam sticky pads. You know, the type - if you want rid of it you have to painfully saw it up using a bit of dental floss, scape as much of the remains off as possible with a razor blade and then douse in intoxicating solvent. All very dangerous and not dissimilar to my ex wife. Anyway, these clips have, to a man, dropped off of their own accord with the foam and glue turning to a toxic looking dust like substance. 

DAMN YOU POUNDLAND MY CABLES ARE AWRY.

Teaching Dogs Tricks

Or, more hard work involving Ubuntu, LIRC, XBMC and my Revo 3700. The dog in question specifically being  my cheap tat probably fake USB IR receiver - the "Fintek  F71610A or F71612A" aka "HP P/N 5187-4593" aka "Model OVU400102/71". This came supplied with a matching MCE remote, but seen as I've already wasted far too long making that one work, I thought why not waste additional precious life and make it work with via my existing TV remote as well?

Step 1a: Go look for an existing remote configuration file.

A full set can be found at the LIRC website and a reduced set in  /user/share/lirc.

Of course my TV is a no-name ("Technika")  item I got from Tesco so impossible to tell if the remote is already supported, because I have no idea what it is because it has no label. This will clearly take longer than it should.

Step 1b: Capture some output from the remote

Open this existing XBMC configuration file in file in an editor:

user/share/xbmc/system/lircmap.xml

Find in that file a section that starts a bit like this:

    <remote device="linux-input-layer">
    <altname>cx23885_remote</altname>
    <altname>devinput</altname>
        <left>KEY_LEFT</left>
        <right>KEY_RIGHT</right>

What you are interested in are two things:

1. Tthe semi-meaningful names for remote buttons, (e.g. "KEY_LEFT", KEY_RIGHT") that are understood by XBMC  etc.
2. The names of the remotes that XBMC understands (e.g. "devinput")

In a terminal execute:

sudo irrecord -d /dev/lirc0 lircd.conf.tmp 

 And follow the instructions. There's three phases:

1. Mash buttons on your remote. Dots (80 of them) get printed as long as a button is pressed
2. Mash more buttons on your remote. Dots (80 of them) get printed once per press
3. Type in a name of a button (e.g. "KEY_LEFT" - see handy list you made previously) -  then press that button on your remote and it will be captured.

At the end of this, you'll end up with a file called lircd.conf.tmp which will contain the captured remote data.

Edit this file  to give your remote a name that XBMC will understand, i.e. find the line:

 name lircd.conf.tmp

and change it to

  name devinput

The captured data was in "raw" mode, we will analyse the data into something moire meaningful and at the same time copy the data to somewhere more appropriate. Change "technika" to something more appropriate for what you have.

$ sudo mkdir /usr/share/lirc/remotes/technika

$ sudo -s 'irrecord -a lircd.conf.tmp > /usr/share/lirc/remotes/technika/lircd.conf.technika'

Step 2:Check if the remote is indeed supported
I'm not sure how effectively I did this. What I did was:

1. Download the supported remote list archive from LIRC
2. Mounted the archive in Nautilus
3. grep'ed the archive with one of the codes I'd captured in the previous step.

The result was - It took forever and did not find a match. So, I'll call my remote currently  unsupported by LIRC.

Step 3: Let LIRC know about the new remote

Edit the configuration file at /etc/lirc. It should already have a line to include the "mceusb" remote, you need to add a second line to include the new one also

#Configuration for the Windows Media Center Transceivers/Remotes (all) remote:
include "/usr/share/lirc/remotes/mceusb/lircd.conf.mceusb"

#  tesco technika TV
include "/usr/share/lirc/remotes/technika/lircd.conf.technika"

And then re-start LIRC so it picks up the new configuration:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/lirc restart

You can test it works in a terminal using:

$ irw 

And pressing some buttons on the remote, you shoukd see their assigned names appear in the terminal. CTRL-C on the keyboard stops irw.

Step 4: There is no Step 4.

You should be now able to start up XBMC and your operate it with the new remote. 

Note that there is a number of possible ways to do this, using different naming conventions - you could for example give your remote a more meaningful name than "devinput" but I've chosen this method because it's the simplest way to add a single remote that involves the least number of files you need to maintain. This helps when trying to move or update XBMC. 

Another several hours of my life spent reading incomprehensible manuals and editing text files. Lucky it's so much fun.

More Cheap Tat.

Continuing my dual pursuits to do things on the cheap with respect to a remote control for my XBMC whilst simultaneously destroying the planet by having the entire contents of e-bay shipped to me in individual packets from the other side of said planet, I received a new remote kit in the post today.

This is a replacement for the old kit which was slightly more broken than I would have liked. To my surprise and his credit the vendor sent me a replacement without even any fuss. Either excellent customer service or the more cynical side of me thinks the mark-up on these is enormous.

Interestingly, the new one appears to have additional features - fake HP stickers!

Left: Old and Busted. Right: New Goodness.

It still advertises itself on the USB bus as the "Fintek  F71610A or F71612A" but now claims externally to be HP P/N 5187-4593 or Model OVU400102/71 - it doesn't seem sure which.

I'm happy to say that both the remote and the receiver are free of the minor faults that were present in the last kit, and thanks to previous efforts worked straight away.

Fascinating Update:

The new reciever is functionally different to the old one as well! The Acer Revo that this is attached to is set to wake on a signal from the remote. On the old unit, any button on any remote (i.e. any IR activity anywhere) would cause a wake; this was mildly annoying. With the new unit, only the power button on the HP remote causes it to wake up. Life is slightly improved.

Cheap Thing in "Works Well" Shokka

U380. Surprisingly functional.

When I first bought my car (Quentin Wilson's "bargain of the year" - an R170 Mercedes SLK) it had a couple of very minor issues. Those being that it was full of water and  the expensive looking "Check Engine" light kept coming on. Diagnosis needed something slightly more sophisticated than what I have in my toolbox (bent screwdivers and dirt) so I took a punt and bought one of these U380 OBD scanners from a popular auction site for just over £20. This is the newer model that can read a CAN bus, my decade old car has no such thing and instead uses one of the older "ISO" protocols - the scanner is backwards compatible. In theory I could have bought the older, non-CAN model U280 scanner but it wasn't significantly cheaper.

So for the price of 10 seconds of a white suited Mercedes mechanic's time I was able to read and reset the fault code. That was some time ago and it's never come back so we will call it fixed.

It won't pick up all the codes the car can generate - for example if I want to read the roof control computer I'll need to re-wire the scanner "a bit". Kind of hoping I won't have to though.

Rust free car oxymoron

There's always some somewhere. Usually hiding behind something prominent.

Lucky I've spent all that time with Italian cars so I can fix it.

This is the only bit of "proper" rust I've found on my year 2000 SLK so far besides some untreated stone chips. I only noticed it because the paint was lifting and starting to push the badge off with it! Most of the damage will be hidden by the badge when it's replaced, the bit that sticks out will get some touch-up paint.

The badge is held on by two pins which go through little plastic plugs in the two holes you can see in the picture. To get it off I removed the bonnet catch from underneath which allowed me access to push directly on the pins to pop it off.